Family Matters

I've always thought of myself as a family centric person. I am the provider to and the protector of my family. I am a fairly easy going person. I like to have fun, joke, and generally have a good time. Sure, i'll poke fun at my own, but when things get mean spirited and those attacks come against me or my family - I am not so much nice. In recent years, I have noticed that my patience (which many will attest has never been my strong suit) has had a noticeably shorter fuse. So my willingness to deal with B.S. has finite borders. My wife's and my relationship with my brother and his wife have had many ups and downs. I like to feel that there were more ups than not, but that may be a purely from my perspective. There have been a couple falls out this past year. Every time there is a fall out, I feel like I lick my wounds from the "battle" and we have a sudo-make up and go back to being cordial with each other. Pretending like we are okay.

Well no more.

This past Thanksgiving we had the whole family together for the first time in a LONG time. I was really looking forward to having everyone together. Well things were less than smooth. For whatever reason, we found ourselves at odds with My Brother and his wife over many things. We planned to get family pictures done on the Saturday before everyone left. I talked with my brother about the where and when - and it turns out that we "had" to do it his wife's way. I believe the quote was " this is where we are going to be, you all are welcome to join if you like, but this is where we'll be." Crap like that just pisses me off. This is just a sliver of my issues with them, but here is not the place or time for the airing of those grievances. I planned to have my family (wife and kids) not go to the pictures at the "time and place" that was directed to me. My dad really asked that I participate and that he would really appreciate it if we were in the pictures. So for him, and him alone, I sucked it up and went. The photographer that was there was nice. She took some decent shots (shown below). We were all gathering back by the cars and trying to determine where we were going to go next. Tony and his wife wanted to go to a place called Adventure Land (or something to that effect). My sister and my family were looking to take the kids to Chuck-E-Cheese's. Both parties wanted to do what they wanted to do. The next thing i know, Tony's wife flips a switch and starts calling us ungrateful and how she doesn't want anything more to do with us. I am not really sure how we are ungrateful - or what specifically I am supposed to be grateful to her / them for... but at this point I don't really care.

I too am done.

I haven't communicated (through any means) with my brother since the blowout on Saturday. I have made a pact with myself not to speak with them until after the New Year (which new year I honestly haven't decided). The timing sucks since we normally have a few "traditions" like Christmas Tree Hunting that we partake in, but I guess that's just the way the cards had been dealt this time.

It'll be a different Christmas this year. My parents won't be coming out here for the first time in memory and we won't see my brother and his family ~ we will just have to find something special to do as a family. Maybe we'll go to a ski resort or something like that.